by G. J. Meyer
Lord Kitchener of Khartoum
“This is not war!”
He happened to be in England during the crisis of August 1914. (He had been invited to come home to be made an earl.) When the war began, he was on a ship preparing to return to Egypt. Asquith called him back to London, asking him to join the cabinet as secretary of state for war. He agreed but without enthusiasm; his sole remaining ambition was to become Viceroy of India, and until that became possible, he preferred to remain in Cairo. In his new post (he did not relinquish his commission as the army’s senior field marshal, or the salary that went with it) he was the first serving officer to hold a British cabinet post since the 1600s. He was a hard and shrewd man and a living legend, as familiar a symbol of the empire as the King. Other members of the government and the army were skeptical when he predicted that the main German invasion force would cross Belgium before entering France, incredulous when he warned that the war was going to last three years at least and that Britain would have to build an army of a million men. He was right on all points. In the end not a million but five and a half million men would serve in His Majesty’s armed forces.
Chapter 12
Flanders Fields
“The enemy fought desperately for every heap of stones and every pile of bricks.”
—OFFICIAL GERMAN ACCOUNT OF FIRST YPRES
The French and British, though jubilant at and in many cases astonished by the German withdrawal from the Marne, were badly battered, worn out, and running low on essential equipment. Many were almost too exhausted to move. “After five days and nights of fighting,” one English soldier wrote, “decimated, spent and hungry, we are lying on the bare earth, with only one desire in our hearts—to get ourselves killed.” And they were short of shells for their artillery. It is one measure of the sustained intensity of this new kind of warfare that the French faced critical shortages of ammunition for the 75mm cannon, their most effective field artillery piece, because only ten thousand rounds were being produced per day. This was barely 20 percent of the need.
For any number of such reasons, the armies of the Entente failed to close with the retreating Germans or exploit the huge gap that had prompted their withdrawal. They did not attack in force until after the German First, Second, and Third Armies had settled into fortified positions on high ground north of the Aisne, the next east-west river north of the Marne. By then it was too late. The fighting was ferocious, with the British especially taking heavy losses in trying to force the Germans out of their defenses, but it accomplished essentially nothing. “Three days ago our division took possession of these heights and dug itself in,” a German officer wrote his parents. “Two days ago, early in the morning, we were attacked by an immensely superior English force, one brigade and two battalions, and were turned out of our positions. The fellows took five guns from us. It was a tremendous hand-to-hand fight. How I escaped myself I am not clear. I then had to bring up supports on foot…and with the help of the artillery we drove the fellows out of the position again. Our machine guns did excellent work; the English fell in heaps…During the first two days of the battle I had only one piece of bread and no water. I spent the night in the rain without my overcoat. The rest of my kit was on the horses which had been left behind with the baggage and which cannot come up into the battle because as soon as you put your nose up from behind cover the bullets whistle. War is terrible. We are all hoping that a decisive battle will end the war.”
The fighting was anything but decisive, however, and the British and French had lost whatever opportunity they might have had to force the Germans into a Great Retreat of their own. Some of France’s richest mining and industrial areas remained in German hands.
The Germans made a final unsuccessful effort to capture Verdun, which if taken would have given them an anchoring strongpoint from which to keep their armies on the Marne. Without Verdun, the Marne line was untenable. In pulling back, the Germans had to abandon valuable real estate—notably the rail junctions of Reims, Amiens, and Arras.
British and French headquarters bubbled with optimism, with Sir John French predicting that his troops would be in Berlin within six weeks. Erich von Falkenhayn, the fifty-three-year-old general and former war minister who replaced a bitterly disappointed Moltke as head of the German general staff (illness was given as the excuse for Moltke’s reassignment), was quicker to see that the war was now likely to be a long one. He encouraged Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to pursue a negotiated settlement on either the Eastern or Western Front—perhaps a negotiated peace with Russia that would persuade the French too to come to terms. Woodrow Wilson’s government in Washington had already offered its services as a mediator, and soon Denmark would do the same. It was already too late, however, for such overtures to bear fruit. None of the warring governments thought they could possibly accept a settlement in which they did not win something that would justify all the deaths. The war had become self-perpetuating and self-justifying.
Though not as ebullient as French and Joffre, Falkenhayn believed that a decision in the field was still possible. Within days of taking command he was developing plans for a fresh offensive, and before the end of September he was putting those plans in motion. He had two primary aims: The first was to correct the Germans’ single greatest vulnerability, their exposed right wing, which came to an unprotected end north of Paris. The other was to capture Antwerp, the last stronghold of the Belgian army, the greatest port on the north coast and, so long as it remained in enemy hands, a redoubt from which the Belgians and British could strike at Germany’s lines of supply.
Falkenhayn could have solved the problem of his exposed right wing by pulling back still farther—by withdrawing, for example, to a line running from the Aisne to Brussels or even east of Antwerp. But this would have surrendered most of the gains of Moltke’s offensive, demoralizing the armies and outraging all of Germany. Instead, he took an aggressive approach, deciding to extend his line westward along the River Somme all the way to the Atlantic. Such a move was feasible only if the French failed to defend the region northwest of Paris, but if it succeeded the Germans would control all of northern France, the ports on the English Channel included. They would be positioned to resume the move on Paris from both the east and the west.
Like Kluck and Moltke before him, however, Falkenhayn was trying to do too much with the resources at hand. To strengthen his right, he ordered the transfer of the Sixth and Seventh Armies from Alsace and Lorraine (where they would be replaced by two of the several new armies now being formed). This was not easily accomplished; the movement of a single army required 140 trains, and only one rail line connected the German right more or less directly with the left. Partly because of the resulting delays, Falkenhayn’s offensive westward along the Somme was not as strong as it should have been; it ran into a new French Tenth Army and was stopped. That left Antwerp, which though more strongly fortified than even Liège (it was surrounded by nineteen large, state-of-the-art, powerfully armed forts plus a number of smaller ones, and defended by nearly a hundred thousand troops) seemed a more achievable objective.
Before the Germans began hauling their siege guns to Antwerp, General Sir Henry Wilson, the BEF’s deputy chief of staff, suggested transferring the BEF from France, where it was tucked between two French armies on the Aisne, to its original position beyond the end of the French left. This meant, as the line now stood, moving the British troops to the Flanders region of western Belgium. Such a change, Wilson said, would put the BEF where it logically ought to be: close to the ports from which it drew its supplies, reinforcements, and communications. Sir John French was reluctant at first, thinking no doubt of the advantages of having one of Joffre’s armies on each of his flanks. But when Winston Churchill pointed out that, if the BEF were in Flanders, the guns of the Royal Navy would be able to support it from the Channel, he changed his mind. A career cavalryman, French began to see the flat terrain of Flanders as a place where his mounted troops could prove their v
alue at last, spearheading a plunge eastward into central Belgium and from there to Germany.
Now it was Joffre’s turn to be reluctant. He feared that if the BEF again got into trouble, and if French started thinking again of taking his army back to England, a position on the coast would make withdrawal all too easy. When French announced that he was moving north with or without Joffre’s assent, Joffre urged him to proceed slowly and cautiously. French instead moved so swiftly that soon Joffre was blaming his haste for the success of German attacks along the Aisne and blaming his commandeering of scarce railcars for the Germans’ capture of the industrial city of Lille. Falkenhayn’s movement of troops and guns toward Antwerp had by this time awakened Joffre to the danger on his left. He moved his Second Army, which Foch now commanded, north into Flanders along with the British. The BEF’s destination was west of Ypres, a lace-manufacturing center endowed with treasures of medieval architecture and suddenly important as the nexus of roads leading eastward into central Belgium and westward toward France and the Channel ports.
When the Germans began systematically crushing Antwerp’s fortresses with their artillery, the British were more alarmed than the French. For a major port so close to England to fall into the hands of an enemy possessing a navy as substantial as Germany’s would be no trivial matter. Winston Churchill hurried a small force of marines—all that were available—to help with the Belgians’ defense. Churchill himself went with it, met with Belgium’s king and queen, conferred with the Belgian commanders, and involved himself in the search for some way to hold the Germans off. He sent a telegram to the government in London, proposing that he be appointed British military commander in Antwerp and replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty. Members of the cabinet were said to have laughed when they read this message; it seemed typical Winston, too eager for adventure, constantly hatching wild ideas, always thinking himself capable of anything. Kitchener, not only the secretary of state for war but the living symbol of the British military (it was his face that fiercely told young Englishmen that “Your Country Wants You!” on the recruiting posters), did not regard Churchill’s suggestion as ridiculous at all. He knew the first lord fairly well and had apparently been impressed. He knew that Churchill had been almost alone in recognizing the importance of the Channel ports even before the turnaround at the Marne and in urging that something be done to secure them. (Nothing had been.) Kitchener proposed that Churchill be made a lieutenant general on the spot. The prime minister did not agree.
By October 6 the Belgians themselves, staggered by round-the-clock German shelling, decided that Antwerp could not be saved and that giving it up was the only way to save their army. Churchill departed for home, and a day later sixty thousand Belgian troops under the command of their king left the city. Demoralized, nerves stretched, they hurried west until they were almost in France, arranging themselves in a defensive line north of Ypres behind the barrier that the River Yser forms as it flows to the sea. There they waited while Foch’s army began to extend their line to the south and British troops filed into Ypres from the west. The Germans, meanwhile, took possession of Antwerp. The end of resistance there freed four German corps, most of an army, for other uses. Whole corps of new, barely trained reserves, many of them student volunteers, were arriving in Belgium from Germany.
As commander of all German forces, Falkenhayn faced far broader problems than did French or even Joffre. He had the vast war in the east to deal with—a war that now stretched across five hundred miles of front and in which his forces and those of the Austrians continued to be outnumbered by frightening margins. The heroes of Tannenberg—Hindenburg and Ludendorff—were scrambling to cope with the Russian threat not only to East Prussia but to Silesia to its south and, farther south still, to the badly shaken armies of Vienna. Two things were imperative. The Germans had to move south to connect with the Austrian left, shoring up Conrad’s armies before they were overrun. And, not having enough troops to defend at every threatened point, they had to go on the offensive. They had to strike a blow that would stop the Russian juggernaut before it became unstoppable.
Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and their operations chief, Max Hoffmann, decided that they could satisfy both imperatives simultaneously by taking a newly formed Ninth Army south by rail to the vicinity of Warsaw, a key base of operations for the Russians. There they could link up with the Austrian left and join it in a move against the four armies that the commander in chief of the Russian forces, the tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Nicholas Romanov, was sending toward Silesia. The Eighth Army would remain behind to guard East Prussia. Ludendorff, bold as usual, wanted to take part of it south too, but Falkenhayn rejected this proposal as too risky.
These movements set the stage for the First Battle of Warsaw, in which eighteen German and Austrian divisions found themselves in the path of sixty Russian divisions advancing on a 250-mile front. Conrad’s assignment was to break the Russian line in the south by moving forward across the River San in Galicia, but his attempts to do so failed. Farther north, the German right and center made swift progress at first but then were slowed by days of torrential rain. “From Czestochowa we advanced in forced marches,” an officer in charge of munitions transport wrote. “During the first two days roads were passable, but after that they became terrible, as it rained every day. In some places there were no roads left, nothing but mud and swamps. Once it took us a full hour to move one wagon, loaded with munitions and drawn by fifteen horses, a distance of only fifteen yards…Horses sank into the mud up to their bodies and wagons up to their axles…One night we reached a spot which was absolutely impassable. The only way to get around it was through a dense forest, but before we could get through there it was necessary to cut an opening through the trees. For the next few hours we felled trees for a distance of over five hundred yards…For the past eight days we have been on the go almost every night, and once I stayed in my saddle for thirty consecutive hours. During all that time we had no real rest. Either we did not reach our quarters until early in the morning or late at night. We consider ourselves lucky if we have one room and straw on the floor for the seven of us. For ten days I have not been out of my clothes. And when we do get a little sleep it is almost invariably necessary to start off again at once…Long ago we saw the last of butter, sausages, or similar delicacies. We are glad if we have bread and some lard.”
As the Germans struggled forward, the Russians had time to assemble a mass of forces and counterattack. The German left was gradually bent back under the weight of repeated assaults until it faced northward instead of eastward and appeared to be on the verge of disintegrating.
By October 17 the Germans saw that they had to withdraw or be destroyed. The Ninth Army retreated sixty miles in six days, and by the time it was free of the Russians, it had lost forty thousand men. Overall the campaign had cost Germany a hundred thousand casualties, including thirty-six thousand men killed, the Austrians between forty and fifty thousand. The Russians pulled their guns out of the slime, and Grand Duke Nicholas began reassembling his sodden forces for a resumption of their advance.
By the start of the German retreat from Warsaw, Sir John French was beginning to move some of his forces eastward in Flanders. Falkenhayn, at almost exactly the same time, was setting in motion a westward offensive over adjacent ground. Until hours before their armies crashed into each other, neither was expecting to encounter an enemy in force. Both commanders were after territory: French’s goal was Brussels by way of Ghent, while Falkenhayn wanted the area directly west of Belgium and the port towns that would come with it. Each was eagerly aware that, if he could advance far enough, he might then be in position to turn away from the sea and encircle his enemy. Glory seemed just over the horizon.
Almost immediately, both sides encountered immovable resistance. A joint French-British thrust toward Ghent ran into Falkenhayn’s main force and was thrown back. The Germans tried to tear through the Belgian line at the Yser, but they too were stopped. Thus was set i
n motion the month of carnage called the First Battle of Ypres.
The nightmare was nowhere more hellish than where the Germans met the remains of the Belgian army. The suffering was magnified for the Belgians by the impossibility of digging in the waterlogged ground of the Flemish lowlands; for the Germans by the terrors of trying to cross a river under infantry fire while British navy shells screamed down on them from the nearby Channel; for both sides by the approach of winter and the new experience of being not only wet but half-frozen day after day and night after night.
King Albert rallied the Belgian troops. He was a competent soldier and a young man of considerable courage. He was also motivated: Foch had sternly warned him that if he failed to hold this last sliver of Belgium, he could not expect to retain his throne after the war. His Majesty positioned noncommissioned officers behind his line with orders to shoot any man who tried to retreat.
After days of murderous German shellfire that killed or wounded more than a third of the Belgians and effectively ended their ability to stand their ground, Albert played his last trump card. He ordered the opening (in some places the process required dynamite) of sluice gates in the dikes holding back the sea. The Germans, who were getting more and more men across the Yser and sensed that victory was near, could not understand what was happening. In the morning the ground was covered with ankle-deep water. Assuming that this was the result of the continuing rains, the Germans slogged on. By midnight, the water was knee-deep and still rising. The Germans not only had to give up any hope of continuing their offensive but spent a difficult night getting their troops back to dry land. Soon they were separated from the Belgians by a five-mile-wide, shoulder-deep lake, and that part of the fight was at an end. The German troops who had been attacking across the Yser were sent south to join in the fight around Ypres. They found themselves in a terrible struggle, often hand to hand, for the villages atop the low ridge that circled around Ypres to the north, east, and south. The German objective was to break through the Entente line on that ridge and close in on Ypres itself.
